Starring Russell Crowe, Jennifier Connelly,Ed Harris,Paul Bettany, Christopher Plummer and others
Script by Avika Goldman
Director:Ron Howard
"Based" on the biography by Syvia Nasar
There is one aspect of this production which is not at all controversial. No reasonable person can argue that the incredible determination it brought to dumbing down its subject so as to make it palatable to village idiots everywhere, was narrowly mercenary, ruthless, and offensive in the extreme. It was insulting to the intelligence of the American public at a time, since the advent of George W. Bush to the presidency, doesn't need any more insults. What connections it may have to scholarship, science, mathematicians or mathematics are below the level of "The Revenge of the Nerds" - in many ways this was the better film . Two examples chosen from a great many set the tone:
John Nash ( Russell Crowe) has just entered Princeton University as a graduate student. He has yet to do the work in mathematics that will make him famous. He is already psychotic but we will not learn this until half-way through the film. On the day he moves into his dorm room he opens the door onto his first hallucination , Charles Herman, (Paul Bettany), student of English literature specializing in D.H. Lawrence. Although we are led to understand that Nash cultivates hallucinations because he is friendless and desperately lonely, he also seems to spend much of his time sitting in Princeton's student bars surrounded by a dozen fellow grad students in mathematics . All of these mental virtuosos are similarly dressed; together they conjure up the image of a pack of jocks from one of the frat houses,, out on the town for a night of drinking, brawling and screwing. Although Charley the Hallucination often advises Nash to stop his obsessive overwork and get a bite to eat, he never seems to be around when Nash sits down at a table in the bar. With all of his books and papers in front of him, he joshes with the others just like one of the boys.
In a crucial scene, Nash decides to help this band of math jocks "get laid" ( a conception straight out of Hollywood: all women in bars are whores ) . He does so by spontaneously inventing ALL of Game Theory!! Not a mention, let alone a word of credit, to John von Neumann, Oskar Morgenstern, Milnor, Poundhouse, etc., etc ... We are to understand that the Nash revolution in both mathematics and economics happened as if by magic through gazing at the dopey blond who waltzed over to his table, shook her hips and ogled her eyes! In a moment of high drama (which, predictably, captures neither curiosity nor passion), Nash rises up from the table and rushes to his room, muttering " Adam Smith was wrong!"
In the real world the young John Nash only added a corollary ( albeit of some importance) to von Neumann and Morgenstern's monumental treatise on Game Theory. When he shows his paper to Professor Helliger ( aka Solomon Lefschetz, played by Judd Hirsch), he is rebuked for challenging 150 years of established thought in economics. "A Beautiful Mind" thereby obliterates, for our convenience, Malthus, Ricardo, Marx, Kropotkin, Keynes, and a lot of others and, of course, John von Neumann and Oskar Morgenstern. Presumably all of these supposedly famous economic thinkers should have spent more time in bars picking up broads.
Early in the film we learn that Nash is a genius,by watching him hopping about like a bird on the Princeton lawn, writing down data gotten from observing other, more conventional, birds pecking at crumbs. As he tells us, he's "searching for the algorithm." Pretty dumb stuff: but there is more.
Already famous in his 20's, Nash heads off to MIT. Soon he is called to the Pentagon to decipher certain mysterious Russian codes. At the strategic heart of the American defence empire, the wizard Nash stares at a flourescing board flashing meaningless sets of numbers. He stares, and stares, and stares; soon the film audience itself begins to develop eyestrain. The room twirls, Crowe's face takes on a pronounced intensity of concentration ... Shazam! Suddenly patterns begin to pop up out of nowhere!! The math wizard calls for maps: these numbers are actually latitudes and longitudes of locations around the United States where the Russians may start dropping H-bombs.
"MIT" in the movie is not M.I.T. : it's a collection of buildings looking more like a mental hospital than the one where he ultimately ends up. As an employee of the Institute, Nash is expected to teach; and he is shown doing so with very bad grace. The male students are all dressed like department store dummies in Bloomingdale's; the women look like the labels on cheese packages, circa 1953. Dr. Nash, the great genius professor, wears an undershirt! (This is out of character not only with the situation, but with the film as a whole: in almost every other scene he wears a suit, or at least a tie, even when sitting on the porch of his Princeton residence, alone and certifiably insane.)
Back to the classroom . Although the subject being taught is Multi-variable Complex Analysis, Nash's equations are in the field of Algebraic Topology. Almost 40 years later an eager kid will corral him and begin to spout ideas in Category Theory, a subject very distant from the known concerns of John Nash ( both the real and the fictional one ) . This may not matter to a movie audience, but is noticeable to mathematicians. Mere quibbling on my part , I agree. It is, however, symptomatic of the film's invariable avoidance of real science.
A Beautiful Mind does contain one rather charming tribute to the delights of the scientific life . Nash and his fiancee, Alicia Larde ( Jennifer Connelly) have finished dinner at the governor's mansion ( almost all scenes are set in high-class elite environments). As they take a stroll on the lawn, Nash takes Alicia's arm by the wrist and points out patterns in the stars of the Milky Way. The scene is beautifully crafted, and it does convey something of the wonder and excitement of science.( Of course, since Alicia has been type-cast as a graphic artist, it should perhaps have been she who points out the patterns to him.)
The travesty of the so-called mathematics displayed in "A Beautiful Mind" is exceeded only by the more blatant obscenity of its portrayals of mental illness and psychiatry. It is bad enough that Avika Goldman's fantasy portrait of a supposed psychosis should be characterized as 'schizophrenia' ; we must also be told by the all-knowing Dr. Rosen ( Christopher Plummer) , that 'schizophrenia' can only be arrested, never cured, by massive dosages of insulin shock therapy and neuroleptic drugs. Misinformation on a disease already invented by the script-writer can do little to enrich the public dialogue on mental illness.
Dr. Rosen's diagnosis does not go unchallenged. In a long, wrenching scene distinguished only by its appalling childishness, Alicia assures Nash that his hallucinations are all in his mind, and that the only cure, as she explains amidst oddles of hugging, petting and coddling, will be the time-hallowed push in the bush. One might calls it Hollywood's invariable message to the world: Sex is Truth.
A few paragraphs suffice to show why the so-called 'schizophrenia' of A Beautiful Mind, belongs more to the fantasy world of Avika Goldman rather than its principal character, the fictional John Nash, even less to the real Nash back in his office at Princeton:
The mental illness of the supposed Nash is translated into a conclave of hallucinations, each of which one may presume to be a metaphor for a specific emotional pathology. This being the case, it is rather strange that his imagined room-mate ,Charles Herman, always has the paradoxical effect of restoring Nash to stability and mental health. He's in some sense a hallucination in reverse, given that Nash is always pictured as being much sicker ( obsessed, lonely, bitter, unhappy) before he conjures up Charley, than he is afterwards.
In this respect Nash's other major hallucination, William Parcher ( Ed Harris) , is more convincing. His presence always plummets Nash into deep paranoia fantasy states . By some quirk Nash's extreme and absurd behavior in the company of 'Parcher' is never remarked by anyone until he's just about ready to be dragged off to the mental asylum.
Why would Nash invent both a friend and a nemesis as hallucinations? Herman is pictured as being a very good friend indeed. If he is so helpful to Nash in positive ways, why should he be classified as a symptom of madness?It is not implausible to imagine that Nash could has found such an individual in the real world. Parcher on the other hand is the very stuff of Batman movies.
The third hallucination, the schoolgirl Marcia , is so silly and pointless that there is no need even to discuss the rationale for her presence in the cast. Oddly, Nash begins to recover his sanity when he realizes that Marcia isn't getting any older over the years. ( Of which only 2 have passed in the film's bizarre chronology). Well, if Marcia is just a hallucination, what's to prevent Nash from hallucinating her aging as well as her appearance ! Furthermore Nash's hallucinations are always dressed exactly as they were when first introduced ! Nash never notices this. Presumably the film audience doesn't notice this either; or if it does , it makes excuses.... as one must continually do throughout this dismal flick. Not once does Nash command his internal movie studio to diversify the costuming.
Despite his madness, Nash is , with the exception of a single scene, never incoherent, neither to his friends nor to his hallucinations. This lone exception is the scene purporting to re-create the real John Nash's disastrous presentation of his proof of the Riemann Hypothesis. In the life of the real Nash this happened at a math conference in Columbia. Goldman moves the event to Harvard, which is quite all right, even though the campus used in the film doesn't begin to resemble Harvard's.
From the standpoint of effective drama however, the scene is a total flop. When it really happened the incident was a catastrophe: some of the most famous mathematicians in the world witnessed the spectacle of a great mind gone completely mad. Any competent film maker could have milked such a scene for all it was worth. In A Beautiful Mind the scene is utterly innocuous. Although Nash is talking nonsense, the mathematicians in the audience are shown straining to comprehend what he's saying, somehow interpreting the seeming lack of logic in his utterances as their own inability to follow his deep reasoning. In this respect they look like most mathematical audiences at most mathematics lectures, even those given by perfectly sane individuals!
Minutes before Nash gives this talk he runs into, of all people, Charley( the Hallucination) Herman! As befits old friends their conversation is warm, sensible and lucid. The only clue we have that Nash has really gone off the deep end is the 3-day old growth of beard and a somewhat contrived weird look in the Crowe's eye.
In summary. there is nothing in the content of A Beautiful Mind to appeal to persons of even moderate intelligence. Formally the film has many excellencies. I happened to like the minimalist ( Phillip Glass style) score of James Horner, excepting only the drippy love song at the end. The camera work is professional, the action is well-paced, the violence is exciting, the lust insipid: all things that a Hollywood film should be. All the actors must be commended, including the effective cameo appearances by Austin Pendleton and Judd Hirsch. They did their very best to rally behind a script that can only be considered demeaning to their exceptional talents.